Nowadays, New Age is everywhere. Some are into nature sounds (I particularly enjoy writing while "rain" falls all around me), some into crystals, others dig reflexology.

But go back to 1970 and the concept of New Age was an obscure one. Some hippies were into Yoga, but by and large the New Age movement had yet to ignite.

The spark it needed was the 1970 publication of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. The tale of a seagull who wanted more out of life than fighting amongst other members of his species grabbed the nation's attention that year, and became a runaway best seller.

And just like that, many decided the rat race was no longer for them. After all, what was the difference between clawing one's way up the corporate ladder and fighting your fellow seagulls for a piece of rotted fish that had washed up on the shore?

Thus, Richard Bach's tiny little novel (I read it in a single day when I was twelve) revealed the dissatisfaction that many Boomers and their younger parents had with their mundane lives.

Thinking like that was a million miles away from that of our grandparents, who were simply glad to have survived the Great Depression without starving to death.

Continue reading "When We Went Nuts Over a Seagull" »

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September 1968 was a time of unequalled tension in the US. Our fathers, brothers, sons, and friends were dying in Vietnam. We had endured the spring and summer assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. LBJ had thrown in the towel. The Democratic national convention was marred by a massive, heavily televised riot.

It seemed like everyone was either killing, dying, or otherwise wreaking havoc, regardless of where they stood on any issues. Just who were the bad guys, anyway?

Songwriter extraordinaire Tom T. Hall, and beautiful, no-nonsense-voiced Jeannie C. Reilly let us know in no uncertain terms who the enemy truly was: self-righteous hypocrites.

It was just what we needed. The combined efforts of the two talents provided us with Harper Valley PTA, one of the most recognizable songs in history, and a crossover hit that made it to #1 on both the pop and country charts.

Continue reading "The Day We Heard About a Bunch They Called the Harper Valley PTA" »

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Ladeeeees and gentlemen! Presenting the 78th Blogging Boomers Carnival!

It's over at The Boomer Chronicles. Enjoy!

I am currently recovering from the last yard sale I shall ever conduct.

Yeah, I say that every time, but I'm 49 years old, and I have seriously gotten too old for this stuff.

Anyhow, while digging through our old stuff to sell, I stumbled upon a true find for any blogger who occasionally suffers from writer's block:

Two little boxes cram full of Trivial Pursuit Baby Boomer edition questions!

I was a seriously good Trivial Pursuit player, as would be expected of a lifelong avid reader with slightly-better-than-average recall ability. My wife and I discovered the Baby Boomer Edition in the mid 80's. It was a blast, hearing questions about all of those things we grew up with, and was no doubt an early influence on what would one day become I Remember JFK.

Anyhoo, I'm actually looking forward to my next case of writer's block. I'm sure I'll be just a few trivia questions away from inspiration!

When I would accompany my mom to Farrier's IGA store for the weekly purchase of groceries, I would spend a long time at the cereal aisle. Eventually I would select a box of sugar-sweetened goodness and present it for her approval.

"You just want this one because of the toy inside!"

How could she say such a thing? I mean, of course, it was TRUE, but still...

Indeed, sometimes I would select a cereal whose flavor didn't really ring my bell for the prize inside. I remember selecting a box of Sugar Crisp once whose back featured a cutout record covered with images of Sugar Bear, Shoobee Bear, and Doobee Bear (snicker, snicker! Those clueless cereal execs at it again!). I just had to have that record, even though the cereal itself was awful (to this kid, obviously millions disagree). The internet being the amazing thing that it is, here's the record on YouTube!

Continue reading "Breakfast Cereals, Part 3" »

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I wonder if any Boomer kid in the US ever grew up without breakfast cereal in the morning? Sure, some days we would be treated with Cream of Wheat, Malt-O-Meal, or perhaps full-blown bacon and eggs, but by and large mornings were busy times for families. This was particularly true in the case of my own dual-income household. Dad would be getting ready for another day at his truck garage, and mom would likewise be preparing for her own vocation of teaching a first grade class at Wilson Elementary, on the other side of town from my own alma mater of Nichols.

Needless to say, cooking breakfast was a difficult venture. So most mornings, it was one of a bevy of cartoon characters who provided me with the essential sugar that a kid used to get going in the early hours.

These friendly faces included So-Hi (I'll bet the clueless execs who named the stereotypical Chinese Rice Crinkles pitchman were the butt of many jokes among the younger staffmembers at Post over that moniker), Tony the Tiger, Capn' Crunch, King Vitaman, The Kellog's Corn Flakes rooster, the Blue Gnu, and the very weird Apple Jacks apple face.

Continue reading "Breakfast Cereals, Part 2" »

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We Boomer kids all had one thing in common: mornings were accompanied by breakfast.

Nowadays, I rise from bed at 3:30 AM and drive a half hour to my job as a geek (which I love, BTW) and begin drinking copious amounts of strong coffee while handling the third shift technical support calls which came in during the night.

Those out of the way, I might slip into the breakroom for a breakfast of lowfat pretzels or the like.

Yes, very strange, I admit. But strange breakfast food comes naturally to a kid who grew up eating a before-school concoction of sugar, milk, and a small amount of actual nutrients, to be consumed whilst reading the back of the cereal box.

BTW, the large graphic above is quite out-of-character for I Remember JFK, to be sure, but its anonymous creator simply made something too amazing to be shrunk down.

Continue reading "Prelude: Breakfast Cereals" »

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It's time to go check out the latest Blogging Boomers Carnival up and running over at Don't Gel Too Soon!

Kids in Baltimore woke up one day in 1953 to find a brand new television show just for them. It featured a host named Miss Nancy (Nancy Claster), and was conducted as a school session, beginning with the pledge of allegiance, and ending with something you never saw in school: a magic mirror.

The kids were four and five years old. They rotated in their appearances, so that fresh faces were always on. And the concept was a hit.

In fact, Claster and her husband marketed the Romper Room idea to television affiliates all over the US.

Syndication was in its infancy. Perhaps that's why the package that the Clasters offered was strange by today's standards.

You see, you could either purchase the show intact, straight from Baltimore, or you could produce your own local version, which would strictly follow the same format.

In my area, we got the Baltimore (or possibly Chicago, where the actual show relocated) package, although by the mid 60's, Miss Nancy had stepped to the side and allowed her daughter, Miss Sally (Rogers) to take over on the show. I remember her well.

Continue reading "Romper Room" »

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The decade of the 60's is renowned above all for its protests, particularly of non-Caucasian races demanding an end to being treated as second-class citizens.

But what was going on in small-town America, the little burgs where many of us Boomer kids grew up?

Miami, Oklahoma was my hometown, as regular visitors of this site are well aware. And while we had a large percentage of American Indians, as did practically every other town in the Sooner State, I don't recall seeing any black people while I was growing up.

Many communities that were located outside the deep south had sundown laws. The idea was that non-whites were welcomed during the day, but had best be out of town by nightfall.

I don't know if Miami had such a shameful regulation, whether officially or informally (which was just as, if not more, intimidating). I hope not, but I suspect that they did. Black faces were rare all over the four-state area, comprised of the corners of Kansas, Missouri, and Arkansas that were close to the northeast corner of Oklahoma. In all likelihood, blacks were shunned pretty much everywhere outside of the larger communities like Tulsa and Joplin.

Continue reading "Childhood Race Relations" »

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Ah, life on the road circa 1967. Where would we spend the night? Would dad pull an all-nighter and get us somewhere early in the morning? That was known to happen. Or would we stay at a nice, clean, cheap, joyless motel without a pool?

Or, would dad, feeling flush after a particularly profitable week fixing diesel trucks in his garage, spring for the ultimate experience in lodging? That would, of course, be the Holiday Inn!

Once in a while he did take the splurging plunge, and it was a moment of ecstasy for this kid when he did.

After all, Holiday Inns not only had pools, they were huge, fancy, illuminated, gorgeous pools!

And that wasn't all. Most of them had very nice restaurants, as well. No greasy spoon experiences when we stayed at the motel with the big, friendly green sign outside!

And we kids weren't the only ones who were thrilled. Our moms greatly enjoyed the occasional positive change in the overnight stay experience.

Continue reading "Holiday Inns" »

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Every previous generation had it tougher when they were kids. My own children grew up in a world of Nintendo, VCR-recorded cartoons and movies, and light-up-sneakers. My world was playing outside all day long, black-and-white TV, and PF Flyers. Our parents, of course, grew up during the Great Depression. Food was much more on the minds of many of them rather than play.

But we Boomer kids enjoyed the privileged days of play that our parents never enjoyed. Instead of spending long hours working in the field, as did my father, we spent long hours pursuing imaginative new forms of play.

After all, asking for toys meant hearing about those long hours working in the field all over again. So we learned to keep our requests for toys at a strategic, effective minimum, and to make toys out of things at hand. Many times, these things were provided us by various members of the plant world.

Continue reading "The Toys in the World of Plants" »

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One of the crazes that came after my childhood that never caught my attention was the video game in its various incarnations.

Pong showed up when I was fifteen, followed closely by Space Invaders when I was eighteen. If I was going to get hooked, those were the primo ages to do it.

It never happened. I always preferred pastimes that required physical involvement of real objects, rather than those electronically produced.

I guess that's why I'm so baffled by the generations of kids who followed mine who would gladly curl up with a Colecovision, Nintendo, Wii, or Atari (lots of years just covered there!) on a perfectly beautiful day rather than go outside and enjoy the real world.

I know that if such a thing as the gaming console would have existed circa 1967, and if it had managed to grab my attention, its use would have been STRICTLY for rainy days in the Enderland house. My mom would have insisted on it.

Continue reading "Playing Indoors (Temporarily!)" »

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"Stop throwing that ball around in the house! You're going to break something!"

How many of us heard that sound repeatedly by our impatient mothers? it was enough to make mom go for another cigarette, the stress of worrying about her good lamps!

On July 3, 1929, Dunlop Latex Development Laboratories created the first foam rubber. Why it took another 41 years for someone to figure out that it would make for a great indoor ball is beyond me.

The Nerf ball's history is short and sweet enough. According to the Parker Brothers website:

In 1969, a games inventor came to the company with a volleyball game that was safe for indoor play. After studying the game carefully, PARKER BROTHERS executives decided to eliminate everything but the foam ball. In 1970 the NERF Ball was introduced as the "world's first official indoor ball." It didn't harm furniture, windows or people.

Continue reading "Introducing...the Nerf Ball!" »

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Try this experiment: tell your grandchild to dial a telephone number. Do you get a puzzled stare back?

Indeed, many of our grandchildren are oblivious to such telephone antiquities as cords, dial tones, answer machines (which are still newfangled things to many Boomers) and, of course, dials.

For many of us, a quantum leap in modern technology was the colored phone. Our parents grew up with (if they had phones at all) a black chunk of bakelite that weighed five pounds or more. It was leased from the phone company, and likely was manufactured by Western Electric, thanks to a sweetheart deal with Bell System. Actually, it wasn't so much a sweetheart deal as a monopoly, since Bell and Western Electric were actually under the same corporate umbrella.

Indeed, for many years, it was a breach of Bell contract terms for a homeowner to plug any device into the phone line except for the leased brick phone that Ma Bell provided. Inspectors would check the lines for any devices that varied from the peculiar voltage requirements of WE's phones, and any customer with the chutzpah to do such a thing would be threatened with disconnection.

Continue reading "When We Dialed Telephone Numbers" »

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For a killer dose of IN-credibly great Boomer blogging, check out the 75th edition of the Blogging Boomers Carnival over at Life Two. You'll love it, or double your money back!

We Boomer kids grew up in a pretty consistent political situation: Better Dead than Red.

The communists, ANY communists, were our sworn enemies, that is if you lived in the United States, or most other democratic nations. Russia, Cuba, East Germany, North Vietnam, Red China, they were all the same. The bad guys. The other side. The force from which the world must be protected from further expansion.

That all began to take a turn another direction entirely in 1971.

Table tennis, or ping-pong, was occasionally featured on ABC's Wide World of Sports. While it had its followers, it was far from being one of the more popular competitive contests in the US. But it was a different matter in the Orient. Ping-pong was a passion!

Despite its lack of serious fan base, the US had a pretty good ping-pong team in 1971. They were playing in a tournament in Japan that year when a chance incident of a player jumping on the wrong bus, coupled with a courageous act of generosity by one of his competitors, led to relations normalizing between China (notice we dropped the Red?) and the United States.

Continue reading "China Opens Up to the West" »

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I have vague memories of nursery-rhyme-type records played on our portable player. When the Beatles arrived in February, 1964, I was primed and ready to get into their music. It was lightweight, fun, and easily remembered for later singing in the side yard. My favorite early Beatles songs were "She Loves You" and the bluesier "I Saw Her Standing There." That latter song was rock and roll every bit as hard as anything the Stones were putting out at the time.

I never missed a Sullivan performance, and faithfully tuned in for every episode of the cartoon. I was one six-year-old Beatlemaniac, to be sure.

But then, that year of 1966, the Beatles began growing up. And they dragged me along, kicking and screaming, forcing me to one day grow up as well, although I held off for as long as possible.

Continue reading "Growing Up Alongside the Beatles" »

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This week, we welcome a new Blogging Boomers Carnival member: the Midlife Crisis Queen! Check out her fun blog, and check out this week's tasty Blogging Boomers Carnival #74:

http://midlifecrisisqueen.com/2008/06/16/blogging-boomers-blog-carnival-74/

Roone Arledge was a man to whom any stockholder of ABC should raise a glass on a regular basis. He was single-handedly responsible for taking the perennially third-rated latecomer network and turning it into the sports powerhouse that it was during the time that we Boomer kids were growing up in the 60's and 70's.

Besides Monday Night Football, which is still riding high, Arledge was also responsible for a show which debuted in 1961 whose weekly 90-minute Saturday afternoon run is burned permanently into my memory banks, and probably in yours as well.

"Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport… the thrill of victory… and the agony of defeat… the human drama of athletic competition… This is ABC's Wide World of Sports!"

With those words, I would be parked in front of the television set for the next hour and a half, watching competitions between a bewildering variety of athletes, including figure skaters, drag racers, boxers, gymnasts, and jumping frogs.

Continue reading "Spanning the Globe..." »

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Time was, usually located on Main Street within walking distance of the Dime Store, there was an establishment that carried generic automotive supplies like oil, gas treatment, tires, freon, anti-freeze, windshield wiper blades, and wheel covers. Additionally, they offered diverse non-automotive items like lawn mowers, gardening equipment, higher-end toys (e.g. Radio Flyer wagons), major appliances, and even firearms!

Every town big enough for at least one traffic light had one, and quite a few burgs that lacked an automated traffic control system still managed to support a Western Auto store, or in the central United Sates, an Otasco.

There were probably other local versions of the ubiquitous retail establishments in other parts of the country, as well, If so, please share your memories of them, readers.

They were located everywhere because they offered what people wanted and needed. After all, our fathers all had cars, and you certainly couldn't buy anti-freeze at the IGA. And not every town had a Sears or Montgomery-Wards either, so lawnmowers and clothes dryers had to be obtained elsewhere. Thus thrived the automotive store.

Continue reading "The Automotive Store" »

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The Blogging Boomers Carnival edition # 73 is up and running over at This Marriage Thing. Go have a look!

My wife and I love walking our pair of miniature schnauzers on warm evenings. Lately, we've been walking by yards well-populated with clover, complete with honeybees. That caused a memory to jump into the forefront: catching bugs and putting them in jars with holes punched in the lid.

I'm happy to see the honeybees, because they are in trouble. Their numbers have dramatically dwindled, a combination of mite infestation accompanied by irresponsible pesticide use.

My yard in Miami, Oklahoma was covered with clover flowers. It was an adventure stepping through them bare-footed, and stepping on the occasional bee was inevitable, the insect manifesting her displeasure by leaving her stinger embedded in a seven-year-old foot.

But the bees also provided hours of entertainment, when they were caught in the preferred method of dropping a wide-mouthed jar over the clover flower that was being visited, then lifting the jar and placing the perforated jar lid in place as the bee buzzed angrily inside.

Continue reading "Catching Bugs" »

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A bit late, but here it is!!! This week's Blogging Boomers carnival, hosted by Yours Truly!!!

First off, Did you know marriage was good for your brain? My wife claims I'm not as dumb as I was when she married me, maybe there's something to that. Anyhow, check out the rest of the story over at the Midlife Crisis Queen.

Has the fashion world gone mad? First it was piercing, then tattoos. Only a few months ago fashionistas declared showing your roots was chic too. Now’s there's another crazy thing to add to that list. Check out Fabulous after 40 to read what the Glam Gals have to say about the latest so-called beauty trend.

As the price of gas continues to rise, you might be considering moving to a more 'walkable' neighborhood. This week, Ann at Contemporary Retirement shares a resource that will help you calculate the 'walkability' of your potential new address. Click here.

Letting a child go into the world can be hard but rediscovering your spouse on a child-free vacation is divine. Find out more at ThisMarriageThing.com.

Dont's Gel Yet writes about about elections, might-have-beens and watching HBO's great, great RECOUNT. Check it out.

Guess what, "It's Official: You Can Blame Your Mother." It's one of the most complex of our personal relationships and affects us in more ways that you can imagine. Find out more at Life Two.

I'm too young to be gray, but coloring my hair is prohibitively expensive. What's a baby boomer to do? Click here to find out.

And finally, If you are 60 or older and prostate cancer has you worried, you might want to check out this research request at Gen Plus.

There you go, friends! Enjoy...

Oh, lord. I'm opening myself up to cease-and-desist orders and libel lawsuits here.

Well, I have freedom of speech. So here goes...

According to the Georgetown Journal of Legal ethics, Summer 2005 issue, in an article by Emily Olsen, this summed up the stance of the American Bar Association once upon a time:

In 1908, the American Bar Association ("ABA") established and promulgated its first ethics code, known as the Canons of Professional Ethics, which condemned all advertisement and solicitation by lawyers. Academics at the turn of the century generally viewed advertising as not appropriate for the legal profession. They believed that only tricksters used legal advertising in order to improve their reputation and an honest lawyer worked to earn his good name. "In the case of the lawyer, advertising of one's own willingness to be trusted as a man of unselfish devotion frosts the rose before it has a chance to bloom."

Wow, shades of the NRA (and I am NOT anti-gun, before anyone's hackles get raised) coming out against machine guns and sawed-off shotguns in the hands of the general populace in the 1930's. Once upon a time, common sense was much more common.

Well, the times they-have-a-changed.

Continue reading "When Litigation Wasn't So Blasted Commonplace" »

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The year was 1972. George Carlin, brilliant comedian best known at the time for his portrayal of the "Hippy Dippy Weatherman" on Johnny Carson and Flip Wilson Show appearances, released an album called Class Clown. The album, which appeared without parental advisory labels way back then, contained a brilliant, highly offensive routine called "Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television."

The Seven Words, which you can view here in all their profane glory, exemplified Carlin's rapier-sharp intelligence when it came to deducing how society works. Clark Gable used what was then known as "the D word" way back in 1939 in Gone With the Wind, and from then until 1972, many formerly taboo words had become acceptable for broadcast television.

But there was no doubt about it: in 1972, there was NO WAY you would hear any of Carlin's Deadly Seven on broadcast television.

How times have changed.

Continue reading "When the Seven Deadly Words Were Really Deadly" »

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